updated 04:20 pm EST, Tue December 1, 2009

Android 2 may get carrier billing

Google may be launching Android 2.1 just a month after 2.0, a combination of rumors suggests. Along with an update to Android's terms of service, info obtained by AndroidAndMe suggests the firmware will be available the same day. It also follows a makeover of the Android.com website that usually precedes wider availability of a new Android release.

The 2.1 update will be less dramatic an upgrade to Android 2.0 but should still address some of the problems that have hurt Android development versus the relatively streamlined iPhone App Store experience. If accurate, customers would see a redesigned Android Market with the option billing directly through their carrier instead of the more problematic Google Checkout. Handset owners could also shop from the web on a computer instead of having to download apps from third-party sites or a smartphone's native store portal.

The revision would ship for "select devices" sometime after December 11th and could come to the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris in an over-the-air update. The HTC Hero may also skip directly to 2.1 from its older Android 1.5 revision.

really

Google Checkout is problematic, but Carrier billing isn't? Even with recent reports of them intentionally making it easy for end-users to 'accidentally' hit buttons causing extra charges?

And this fragmentation of the platform is what will hold back the non-Apple smartphones (particularly ones based on licensed OS's, like Android and WinCE). Apple can provide free updates to the OS, that add significant new functionality, because it drives customers to buy new apps from the App Store. For the licensed OS's, the people with the most amount of work (namely, the phone manufacturers, get zero money for any work they put into porting new revisions of the OS to older phones [short of charging for OS upgrades, which they can't charge for anymore without making the iPhone look even better]. And the process is made even more expensive because they also need to port their customizations as well. With this revision, the carriers have some incentive to make the upgrade available, as they can now get their customers to spend money with them instead of google, but again, it's the manufacturer who has to do all the work. And who [other than the end-user] will pay Microsoft's OS upgrade fee?

For all other phones besides the iPhone, it's in everybody's (except the customers) best interest to get the customer to buy a new phone instead of upgrading the OS of their existing one.